Residencies

During 2001-08, every year we hosted a small number of residencies at Sarai. Residents were mainly new media artists from South Asia as well as from Australia, Europe and the US. Below is a list of the artists-in-residence over these years.

2001

Bauke Freiburg (September – October)

Conducted research and tested codes for OPUS, an online platform for the public rendition of video and audio materials.

Syeda Farhana Zaman (November – December)

A photographer and student of photo-journalism at the Drik Pathshala, Dhaka. She worked on a project documenting the lives of Bangladeshi migrants in Delhi.

Silvan Zurbruegg (December 2001 – May 2002)

A student of New Media at the University of Design and Art, Zurich. Collaborated with the Sarai Media Lab to programme OPUS.

Sreejata Roy (December)

She did a short residency wherein she used web technology to create an ‘Online Digital Diary’ which is a narration of routine lived experience of working women in Delhi, Kolkata and in Coventry.

2002

Dylan Volkhardt (August – November)

Dylan Volkhardt explored the cross-cultural implications of New Media Practice and Theory, and developed a project with the Sarai Media Lab. His work was set up as an installation at the Tactical Media Lab in November 2002. He also made a presentation of his earlier works and screened Australian documentaries that he had presented to the Sarai Film Archive.

Meaghan Delahunt’s first novel, ‘In the Blue House’ (Bloomsbury), based on the life and death of Leon Trotsky in Mexico, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, in the Best Book category in SE Asia and South Pacific, and the Saltire Society Award in Scotland. She is now at work on her second novel, ‘The Prayer Wheel’.

Delahunt was hosted by Sarai in New Delhi on a residency supported by the Asialink Residency Programme of the Australia India Council and the Australia Council. During her residency she conducted a fiction writing workshop, Writers’ Unblock, and a reading session from her first novel.

2003

Amanda McDonald Crowley was Associate Director of the 2002 Adelaide Festival of Arts, prior to which she was Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT). She has been involved in electronic arts and multimedia since the mid-1980’s. She undertook a series of lectures and workshops on curatorial practice in the new media field and also helped initiate regional and international networks at Sarai. Her residency was supported by the Asialink Residency Programme of the Australia India Council and the Australia Council.

Astra Howard is currently researching the transitional nature of urban public space environments. She chose Beijing, Paris, New York and Delhi as sites for comparative analysis research. At Sarai she observed and recorded transitory public space interactions through text/sketching, photographs, sound and video recordings. She developed a site-specific performance in a busy public area in Delhi and presented this as well as her earlier work at Sarai.

2004

Victoria Donkersloot and Silvan Zubruegg

Victoria, from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and Silvan, an independent programmer from Zurich, collaborated on the Apna Opus programme.

Lekhoni Gupto

Lekhoni, from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, worked with the Cybermohalla team.

Linda Hilfling and Kristoffer Gansing

Linda and Kristoffer, both from Germany, worked on low cost technological solutions in the context of the CM Labs.

Oliver Leistert

Oliver, a media critic and researcher from Germany, has been developing a research project on the theme of ‘Digital Inequality’ in conversation with the Sarai Media Lab team.

Konrad Bayer

Konrad, a sound artist from Germany, investigated the worshiping of Muslim-saints in a contemporary and urban setting, the mega city of Delhi. To download some of his sound work, produced during the Residency, go to Media Forms.

Pramod Raghavendra

Pramod, from Mahiti, Bangalore, worked on the Kannada Open Office project with the FLOSS programme.

Amitabh Trehan

Amitabh, a programmer/doctoral student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, worked on the use of LaTeX as a publishing platform for applications specific to Indian languages.

Falk Schleicher

Falk, a post-graduate student of cultural studies from Germany, conducted research on interactions of local and global cultures in the Paharganj area of New Delhi, a dense commercial and residential area that caters mainly to low-budget tourists.

2005

Sara Kolster (December 2005 – January 2006)

Sara Kolster is a visual artist with a background in design. The focus of her work has shifted more towards video and film; capturing details from urban locations, visualizing fragments of stories of these environments. She uses different strategies, from time-based media (video, film, photography) to appropriated research methods belonging to different observational disciplines (journalism, documentary & archeology). she extensively photographed Delhi. Some of the photographs, she made during her Residency can be seen on her website.

Read more about her work at here. Visit her blog to read about her explorations of the city during her Residency with Sarai.

Sophea Lerner

Sophea Lerner is a radiomaker, sound engineer and new media artist based in Delhi. During her Residency, she was based in Helsinki, Finland where she taught media and sonic arts at the Centre for Music & Technology. Her work combines experimental radio and new media art into a collaborative practice that explores audience interaction through movement and sound. She is currently affiliated with the Khoj Workshop and Sarai-CSDS, where she is currently engaged in practice based research towards a Doctor of Creative Arts at University of Technology, Sydney.

Lerner’s work brings together experience in group devised physical performance with many years of experimental radio and new media art into a collaborative art practice which explores mediated temporal experience. Her radiomaking encompasses intricately composed radiophonic projects as well as engineering and production and collectively devised, rapidly executed semi-improvised live broadcasts. Community and creative networks are integral to collaborative aspects of her practice.

2006

Tapio Makela (October – December)

Tapio Makela is a media artist, researcher and an event organiser based in Helsinki, Finland. Besides, using the Residency for his own research,Tapio facilitated a workshop on FLOSS. This workshop looked at new media practices in urban contexts. He also participated in a Locative Gaming workshop, faciliated by Waag. Find details of the workshop here. To read more on Tapio Makela’s work, click here.

Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi (November – December)

Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi are artists and writers based in Amsterdam. They collaboratively run Pages (Safiye)- a platform for Iranian artists and writers, in different fields, to publish their projects and to exchange thoughts internationally.

Their work, ‘Conversing the Cut’ was exhibited at Sensor-Census-Censor: An International Colloquium on Information, Society, History and Politics.

During their residency at Sarai in Delhi in November and December 2006, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi had some exchanges with the practitioners of the Cybermohalla Labs. One of the coversations was about the architectural disposition of spaces.

2007

Jamil Yamani and Louisa Dawson (October – December 2007)

Sarai hosted Jamil Yamani, artist and Louisa Dawson, sculptor, from Australia. They ran a collaborative workshop with a marginalised community in Delhi.The collaboration facilitated the production of the participants own short experimental documentaries, between three and five minutes each. The result was nine video works on HIV/AIDS.

Jamil works within the areas of migration, cultural identity, borders and diaspora. Jamil continues to explore migration, identity and other related themes within his work. While he was originally apprenticed to Professor Ernst Fuchs, in Vienna, Austria as a painter, he went on to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours First Class and a Masters of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. He majored in Video Art, an area in which he still practices today, binding technology with a special interest in social phenomena.

His work has been exhibited at artspace Sydney, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Performance Space, Sydney, Customs House, Circular Quay, Sydney, Space 3, Sydney, COFA Exhibition and Performance Space, UNSW, Sydney. His collaborative work has been exhibited in Taipei, Taiwan, Broken Hill, NSW, Gallery 4A, Sydney and Electrofringe, Newcastle. His screen-based work has been shown in Sydney and internationally, and he has given occasional guest lectures most notably at the Sydney arm of Boston University, USA. He has also collaborated with Professor David Malin to create the first new media visual component to accompany the work of a major Australian Composer (Ross Edwards) and presented in pre-eminent concert venues including the Adelaide Town Hall and the Sydney Opera House.

His latest work The Glittering City exhibited at Campbelltown Arts Centre was multi-screen video and multi-channel audio embedded video sculpture. Advice and mentorship was provided by two pioneering artists, Allan Giddy, a senior lecturer in electronic arts and Jeffrey Shaw a former Professor from ZKM but currently a director of iCinema, Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, COFA, UNSW.

Louisa completed her Masters of Fine Arts at COFA, UNSW in the year 2007. She has exhibited widely in Sydney and overseas, exhibitions include: The 2004 and 2005 “Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award” in Melbourne, where she received the Peoples Choice Award 2004 and the Emerging Artist Award 2005, “Sculpture by the Sea” in 2001 and 2005, Casula Powerhouse, Artspace, and the “Dresden Stadtfest” in Germany. She has also received the ‘Ian Potter Foundation” grant. She received the ISCP Residency, New York, Australia Council and RIPE Award, Art and Australia and the ANZ Bank in 2007

Her recent exhibitions have been Moving House: The Renovation of the Everyday, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2007) (Solo) and Business and Pleasure: Temporary Visitors, Suite 7/11, New York (2007) (Group).

2008

Alana Victoria Hunt (January – May)

Alana Hunt is an Australian artist, who also writes and works with radio. Working across a range of interdisciplinary forms, including printed matter, installation, sound, site-specific public interventions and performance she has a strong preoccupation with the social relevance and engagement of cultural forms within contemporary life.

During her time at Sarai she has been developing a range of ideas and projects. One of which is a photographic based work, for public distribution, exploring the forms of intimacy and trust situated beside dependency and inherent danger between people on motorcycles on the streets of Delhi. She has also been collecting material on the ‘dead’ Yamuna River of Delhi, and developing an aurally based performance piece through a collection of short observational stories/images that deal with situations faced in day to day life.